Future Perfect

by Jen Larsen

  “Right,” he says, and shakes his head and lopes back to his chair. He picks up his book but he keeps glancing over at me. I don’t know how I’m going to concentrate, but my hands are steady when I type in my log-in info, scroll down through the database listings to medical journals.

  When I am certain he can’t see my screen, I type weight-loss surgery and hit enter.

  Brandon leaves before I do, but I don’t pay much attention. I don’t look up from the monitor until the lights flicker on and then Dr. Trujillo is saying, “What are you doing in here so early? Did I give you a permission slip? I don’t remember giving you a permission slip,” in her slightly befuddled way.

  I’ve taken notes. Almost automatically I reached for the stack of scrap paper and started writing down words like malabsorption and gastroesophageal junction and duodenum. I’ve gone beyond basic biology and how food proceeds through your body and then out, and now I’m deep in the minutiae of digestion and all the ways you can prevent it. All the ways you can starve your body with a surgeon’s knife. Right now I know what my stomach looks like, in cartoonish flat profile helpfully color-coordinated in primary colors, with arrows pointing to all the parts that can be improved, and dotted lines indicating which parts will instead be sliced off and discarded.

  I know how digestion works, and how we can fool it. I know that the body is smart, and the body is adaptable, and the body will always try to find a way, but we are smarter. We are smarter than our bodies and science has figured out a method, a clumsy method full of hacking and stitching back up, to undo biology and remake it. A messy sewing project that’s designed to circumvent nature, bypass evolution, fix everything that went wrong with your guts somewhere along the way. Because that’s the overall message. Your digestive system might look like everyone else’s digestive system—side by side with a skinny person’s stomach diagram, your colors would match and your arrows would point to the same things and you could never definitively choose one and say, “There. That’s the gut of a person who never second-guesses her ass in skinny jeans.” But a fat person’s digestion is invisibly broken.

  I understand the basic process of digestion now. I can draw you one of these gut diagrams. I could waltz into an operating room and announce that I’d take it from here, I’ve seen the pictures. I understand what weight-loss surgery does and why it works—because your stomach can’t fit any food inside it when it’s been cut down to a quarter of its original size. Because your intestines can’t absorb calories and fat when you’ve rearranged them to bypass those mechanisms that happen naturally (oh, the aha moment when I realize that that’s where the bypass in gastric bypass surgery comes from).

  I can’t find any photos of real stomachs. I want photos of pink and glistening organ meat. I want pictures of torn-open guts. I want to see stitches and staples but these studies don’t offer anything but pages of statistics and diagrams and medical words. All of it seems one clean, logical step removed from reality. Dieting is a messy solution full of what ifs and possibilities and so many pitfalls, a thousand of them, and all of them assignable to personal failures and human weakness. A dieter can try and a dieter can fail—and does most of the time—and dieting doesn’t work because it’s more than calories in and calories out, these journals tell me. Dieting doesn’t work but it’s not the dieter’s fault that they’re weak. And it’s not the fat person’s fault they’re fat. But that can be fixed and that can be rearranged—literally—and everything and everyone can live happily ever after.

  I can see clearly—oh, so clearly—why this appeals to my grandmother. The numbers, the biology, the idea that there is a simple solution to the endlessly vexing problem that your granddaughter refuses to even acknowledge exists. Just send her in to the mechanic, get her back the next day with her digestion hosed out and her windows washed and fluids topped off. It’s cleanly anatomical, filled with neatly delineated starts and stops.

  I was tempted to print out all these studies, all these articles about weight-loss surgery, and carry them around with me but I was already carrying it around. I could feel all that information, all those words and pictures growing huge in my brain, making me feel larger and heavier than ever.

  I drag it behind me out of the library and through the halls, weaving between all the people who have always known me and wouldn’t know what to do with a different me, one that had been tuned up and turned back onto the world with a whole new circuit board. The warning bell, and I start running because the word test flashes bright in my head. I have a test, something real, something I need to be present and focused for, something that is happening now.

  Dr. Reinhart is closing the door of the classroom as I fling myself at it, red and damp and feeling all that tiredness crashing against my back as it catches up to me. And my head feels stuffed with everything I hadn’t gotten rid of, that was supposed to be blown out and cleared away by a fast drive down the coast. Full of everything I’ve added, things I need to think about, things I can’t think about right now because there’s too much that’s more important and I don’t understand enough about this feeling in my gut—my actual gut, the maladjusted lump inside me that is twisting in knots like it was aware it was being talked about. Aware that things could be coming down the pike if my grandmother somehow got her way.

  Everyone in class has got their books away and their calculators and pencils on the desks and they’re all staring at me or whispering to one another, a little hum and buzz rising up that sounds like the fluorescent lights Principle Simons had all torn out because she was convinced they cause cancer. It’s like they’ve never seen someone late to class before. Reinhart says, “Nice of you to join us, Ashley,” as if no one has ever made that joke and she is the funniest person ever.

  I face front, and the test is passed back along the rows; Emma, in front of me, turns to hand me the stack, smiling at me warm and friendly-like for no good reason because seriously we’re about to take a test, and then settling back in her seat. I realize I’m frowning at the back of her head as I drop the stack over my shoulder without looking, and I know I need to get some sleep before I start trying to set everyone on fire with my mind just for glancing sideways at me.

  Reinhart says “Go” and I flip over the sheet. Feel better almost immediately. Everything here is familiar. It is easy to settle into the things I know and the things I understand. Things that are real, unequivocal. Things that can’t be broken.

  CHAPTER 11

  Brandon. Brandon again. Brandon suddenly everywhere. He is staring at me when I push through the glass doors of the cafeteria, which is essentially a greenhouse filled with café tables and organic vegetables grown in waist-high poured concrete planters that alternate rows with the seats. He leaves the restaurant line and heads directly over to me. I resist the urge to dodge behind a tomato plant.

  He skids to a stop and leans forward, his voice just barely above a whisper. “Did you find what you were looking for?”

  I realize I’m staring instead of answering, and just shake my head no. He’s talked to me more in the past few days, at the party, this morning, than he’s talked to me since I asked him out. He had promised me we were great friends, but somehow we just stopped. Now I have the urge to confide in him, though I never have before. I found everything except what I was looking for, I could say dramatically. Sometimes I worry that I have poetry in me, the kind that makes you sentimental and sappy and vulnerable.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. He hesitates. His eyes go soft. I’ve seen that look on boys’ faces and I think I’m panicking about it.

  “Okay, bye!” I shout, and dodge around him, fast-stepping it to our regular table.

  “Where’d you go Saturday night?” Hector says, dropping his recyclable organic corn-product tray on our little café table just as I sit in front of the latte Laura’s already gotten for me. The bamboo centerpiece wobbles and falls over, but Jolene catches it. Hector has stacked three slices of vegan pizza on top of one another, with extra so
y sausage on the top. The chefs give him extra anything he wants. He just thinks they’re super nice and friendly. If he were more self-aware he’d be dangerous. If he were more self-aware, he wouldn’t be with—I stop myself in the middle of that.

  He says, “You left your own party. I was looking for you.” When he hauls out his chair he knocks into the table behind us. The Rebus Club kids glare at him.

  “I texted you,” I say. “The house was crowded. I had to go.”

  “Yeah, but for the whole night?” he says. His eyebrows are all rumpled up and he looks puzzled. “You didn’t even find me before you left. And then you were gone for the rest of the party. I called you.” He looks sad. “You didn’t even text me back Sunday. I wrote a song about it.”

  My heart squeezes. I rest my head against his shoulder. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I needed to go.” I had ignored his calls and texts. I couldn’t have told him about weight-loss surgery. No matter how well I know him, how much I love his arms around me and his kisses on the side of my neck—I would have been afraid to see his face. A part of me, the part that understands how the real world works, might have been scared he’d agree.

  “Skee ball is a dangerous sport,” Laura says. She leans forward and the tips of her scarf are dangling so close to her pile of greasy fries. “Dangerously addicting. We couldn’t stop. We sold all our belongings and camped out at Dizzy’s until closing and then we had to sleep in the ball pit because we couldn’t afford gas.”

  “I would have come and got you,” Hector says.

  “No one can save us from ourselves,” Laura pronounces solemnly.

  Jolene is keeping a very straight face. She pats Hector on the hand. “You’re a good boy, Hector,” she says. Teasing Hector is too easy sometimes. We fall into it the way we fall into formation when we walk, the three of us in a line and our heels clicking in the same rhythm.

  He looks at Jolene, and then at me. His eyebrows are pulled together and he looks kind of lost. “Okay,” he says. “You don’t have to tell me anything.”

  “She tells you everything,” Jolene says comfortingly.

  “She’s an open book,” Laura says. “She can be checked out of any library.”

  “I wish you would have come to find me,” he says to me. I lift my head up. Before I can say anything, he continues, “Your grandmother was looking for you,” and then folds half his pizza slice into his face and chews with enthusiasm.

  “That’s what Brandon said,” I say, and then glance at Laura. She doesn’t look surprised. She is squeezing a perfectly straight line of mayonnaise across her french fry, but she sets it down instead of eating it.

  “Brandon found the note,” Laura says, looking at me steadily. I make a choking noise and she keeps going fast, not dropping her gaze, “He was looking for my car and he saw your name on the note and he picked it up because he thought it was important.”

  “What note?” Hector says.

  I close my eyes.

  “He read it,” I say. Because of course he did.

  “Well, he couldn’t help it,” she says. She is squeezing mayonnaise on another fry and lining it up next to the first one. It looks like she’s building a log cabin.

  “What note?” Hector says again.

  “The birthday note from my grandmother.” I say. This feeling in my stomach (the stomach my grandmother wants me to get sawed into pieces, I think) is humiliation. Exposed and without a way to defend your vulnerable, squishy parts that are suddenly available to judge.

  Did you find everything you need, Brandon had asked so solicitously. Pityingly.

  “Oh yeah!” Hector says. “The car, right? Are you getting a car? What’s she going to give you if you take her up on it?”

  I shake my head. I can’t look at him.

  “Tuition,” Jolene says.

  “Tuition. Like for Harvard? Oh my god! That’s amazing,” Hector says. He takes another outsized bite, and he’s smiling so his cheeks bulge out as he chews.

  “Yeah,” Laura says. “She gets to go to Harvard. In exchange for agreeing to her grandmother’s unacceptably controlling attempts at changing her for no good reason whatsoever.” She’s leaning forward and her voice is rising. Jolene is keeping her head down, but glancing over at the table next to us. The entire Rebus Club is staring at us. I have never been stared at by an entire Rebus Club before and I don’t like it.

  “Laura, I don’t want to talk about it,” I say.

  “It’s not right,” Laura keeps on. Her cheeks are darkening and soon the color will start to creep down to her chest.

  I say, “She is trying to help.” What I have always said.

  “What?” Hector says. He’s finished chewing. His last pizza slice hangs from his fist. “What is she trying to help with?”

  He looks at me as if we have never had this conversation. It is maddening.

  Jolene says, “Her grandmother wants her to get weight-loss surgery.”

  I groan. I want them all to stop talking now.

  “What the hell is that?” Hector says before I can respond. He hasn’t stopped staring at me. I want to ask him to keep up with us, just this once. I shake my head. This never works to clear it.

  “Hector,” I start.

  My voice must not be clear of irritation because Jolene says, “I didn’t know what it was either, Ashley. It’s a fair question.”

  “It’s mutilation!” Laura snaps. She slaps her hand against the table. Her rings clatter on the Formica. The Rebus Club is still staring. “Weight-loss surgery is a brutal maiming of the body’s natural digestive system.”

  “What? You shouldn’t do that!” Hector yelps. He puts his pizza down and his eyes are huge. “Why would your grandmother want you to do that?”

  “It will make her lose weight quickly and help her keep it off permanently,” Jolene says.

  My friends have both done their homework, but apparently they used completely different Google searches.

  “Please don’t talk so loudly,” I say. I’ve never noticed how crowded together the tables are in here.

  “Right. Okay, so, what does Brandon have to do with this?” Hector asks.

  “He knows about it,” I say.

  “Why would you tell him but not me?” His voice is plaintive.

  “I didn’t tell him, Hector. He found out.” The exasperation and anxiety is shimmering right there at the surface of my voice and I fight to keep it from bubbling up and spilling over. He gets so hurt when I snap at him.

  “He told me he found the note because he didn’t want to make you feel like he was lying to you or something,” Laura says, quieter now.

  “I might have preferred being lied to!” I say, and now I’m the noisy one. I suck in a breath and take a sip of my latte to distract myself from trying to see who is watching us. We’re a tiny school full of people who know everything that’s going on with everyone. This wouldn’t be a good thing to miss.

  “He’s probably not going to tell anyone,” Jolene says.

  “Probably?” I say, and I look at Laura.

  “Who would he tell?” she says. “He doesn’t tell people things. You know that. I mean, besides me. I’m obviously a special case because I’m his sister.”

  “Why does it matter if he tells anyone?” Hector says.

  “Because it’s nobody’s business,” I say. And there it is, skipping over irritation and heading straight toward pissed off. I can hear the anger in my voice. A spitting, hissing kind of thing. I can’t stop myself from saying, “Do you really have to ask that?”

  “Apparently,” Hector says, and pushes his chair back. His face is calm and he doesn’t meet my eyes. He bumps into the Rebus Club kids but does not look at them. He rises and shoves through the tangle of tables and chairs and now even more people are looking over at us. Not in the way you always unconsciously assume that everyone is looking at you. In an absolutely concrete, all-eyes-here sort of way.

  I take another sip of my latte and realize I’m tremblin
g. “Shit,” I say.

  “He’s mad, but he won’t stay mad for long,” Jolene says.

  “I’ve never seen him get mad,” Laura says. “I mean, I don’t think I could imagine Hector being mildly miffed. Or vaguely concerned. Or even sort of irritated before now. Wow.”

  Never at me. He never gets irritated with me. “You are not helpful,” I say to Laura unsteadily.

  “You could follow him and apologize,” Jolene says. “I think he’d appreciate the gesture.”

  “Or you can let him go off and experience for the first time what it’s like to be emo! It’ll be good for him. He can write a song,” Laura says.

  I don’t want to see the look on his face. I can’t talk to him right now. “I’m going to go to class,” I say. Guidance is next period. It’s the thing I would like to do least in the world. Thirty-five minutes of Positive Thinking and Visualizing the Future. It has finally happened—I’m tired of thinking about the future. And I don’t have my essay. And Ellman is going to scold me again and talk about my grades again and there is the chance that I can actually go to Harvard now if I finish my essay and I cannot, cannot think about that.

  “I have to skip,” Laura says.

  “Why do you have to skip?” Jolene asks.

  “Drama club is dramatic. Wellesley wants me to come talk seriously to everyone about serious things and how we have to take everything seriously because art, or something like that.” She waves her hand around her head like she’s shooing away gnats, and then frowns. “I hope I don’t miss chi breathing this time.”

  “I hate chi breathing,” Jolene says, poking through the edamame shells in the bowl in front of her.

  “You’re good at it,” I say. I can never bring myself to close my eyes for very long. Jolene’s face is always serene and smooth and open and she is still. The only time I ever see her still.

  Jolene shrugs and the chimes that signal the end of the period start to toll and it’s too loud to talk anymore, with scraping chairs and everyone yelling at each other. Jolene vanishes ahead of us instead of walking with me to class, Laura peels off to go out the side door and through the courtyard, and I am left alone to weave through the maze of chairs. I keep my head down. I make it to the main hallway and the first thing I see is Brandon. The second is Morgan, next to Brandon. Morgan turns her head slightly as I pass and smiles at me. It is her wide “I am totally sincere” smile with all the teeth. They’re going to be late to Guidance, I think, instead of worrying about how she’s looking at me, how he might be looking at me.